Medical Care as Flea Market Bargaining? An International Interdisciplinary Study of Varieties of Shared Decision Making in Physician-Patient Interactions.

Shared decision making (SDM) is a core ideal in the interaction between healthcare providers and patients, but the implementation of the SDM ideal in clinical routines has been a relatively slow process. In a sociological study, 71 interactions between physicians and simulated patients enacting chronic heart failure were video-recorded in China, Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey as part of a quasi-experimental research design. Participating physicians varied in specialty and level of experience.